Wireline Management
Issues Facing Wireline Carriers Today
TRANSPORT MANAGEMENT
First, a major source of outages comes from transport related issues. When a transport issue occurs, the challenge is to identify where the faulty equipment lies. With SONET and IP rings, this can be a difficult challenge, resulting in a technician having to drive to several central offices until he finally identifies the true cause of the alarm condition.
RESPONSE TIME AND COSTS
Secondly, wireline carriers are under substantial pressure to reduce operating costs as well as to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). The level of complexity of the equipment in a central office has grown dramatically over the last few years as the level of service being provided from these central offices has increased from basic POTS to high speed data, and now, even video service. In addition many central offices feed Broadband Loop Carriers (BLC) to distribute service to population areas.
The Solution to the Problem
TelStrat’s PUMA (Platform for Unified Management Access) offers a solution to these issues. By deploying PUMA at a central office, technicians can access critical components to assess the exact cause of an outage or alarm without driving to the site. The PUMA product provides remote access to both traditional serial and Ethernet TCP/IP based network elements as well as contact closures, voltage and current generating network elements. Armed with a connection into each central office, the technician can diagnose the transport equipment at each central office until the true cause of the alarm is identified, reducing the amount of time it takes to get the transport equipment back up and fully operational.
PUMA allows wireline network operators to quickly analyze the problem area, identify the component at fault, determine which central office actually has the problem, and dramatically reduce the cost associated with an outage while reducing MTTR. In fact, PUMA has been proven to substantially reduce the number of trips required to correct a failure and can often be shown to pay for itself in less than one year.
The PUMA platform allows up to 512 simultaneous users to perform Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAM&P) of remote network elements all by accessing a single IP address.
The TelStrat PUMA system consists of two elements:
- One or more Central Controllers (CC-9000)
- A Site Controller (SC-8100) at each central office.
The CC-9000 serves as PUMA’s central command center, communicating directly with each SC-8100 Site Controller, and focusing the power of remote SC-8100 units into a single, unified point of network status information and network ele¬ment management. Multiple CC-9000’s can be located in regional centers or management offices, as well as at NOC centers.
The SC-8100’s are located at each central office. The SC-8100 provides physical connections to all remote network elements, whether by serial or IP (Ethernet) connections, normally open or normally closed alarm monitoring inputs, form C relay outputs, or analog inputs (0-10V or 4-20 ma). Each SC-8100 can support up to 128 individual network elements, and each CC-9000 can support up to 4,096 SC-8100’s, and up to 512 simultaneous users.
The PUMA platform provides a wireline carrier with two substantial benefits: a substantial reduction in the number of truck rolls needed to operate the network and a reduction in the length of an outage when one occurs. Any operator that is under pressure to reduce costs and improve network availability will find the PUMA platform to be a welcome addition to his OAM&P capabilities.
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